The article appeared in the "Indian Review" almost 25 years ago but is still relevant

The Great City

By D.T. Devendra

On March 2, 1815, when the chieftains of Kandy who had assembled in the Audience Hall in solemn convention ceded the sovereignty of the mountain kingdom that had been the rugged heart of Lanka which had throbbed with the spirit of its two-millennium-old independence, none would have dreamt that the city would invite the world-wide attention that it has done one hundred and twenty-nine years later, in the year 1944. Kandy, so the future appeared, was no more to hear war's alarms. It is otherwise, and today the spotlight of history-in-the making has been turned on Lanka's Hill Capital.

Though available records indicate a bare half dozen centuries as the age of Kandy, it is quite probable that its age is much greater. Within a short distance of it there are unmistakable signs of ancient occupation. These are caves with inscriptions which tell us that they had been donated to Buddhist ascetic-monks in the years before the birth of Christ. It is true that the mountain country, the hard core of Lanka, had not been popular with the first Aryan settlers of the sixth or fifth century B.C. Nevertheless, some parts of it had been lived in as far back as these pre-Christian times. The Brahmi legends incised on the brows of these once-tenanted caves are sure evidence of it. Thus, with the proximity of these settlements, it is unlikely that Kandy had been discovered only some six centuries ago by a king who was reigning in a neighbouring city. It is more probable that he himself had heard a tradition of Kandy's strategic value and decided to transfer the seat of government to his discovery.

From the time of the first European contact with Ceylon, the city had been visited by ambassadors of several nations. They have left behind interesting records of their experiences and observations. Robert Knox, a British prisoner of the king for two decades, who returned home in 1680, has written an astonishingly graphic account, not so much of Kandy itself as of the kingdom and its inhabitants. It is a valuable book to which historians freely refer. Among others of his race who went thither were John Pybus, Hugh Boyd and Robert Andrews, all in the service of the East India Company, who too wrote revealing accounts of their journeys. The account of Pybus' mission to King Kirti Sri Rajasinha (of cherished memory) was found in the records of the Madras Government and published a hundred years later from his "Report to the Hon'ble George Pigot, Esq., President and Governor and the Gentlemen of the Select Committee at Fort St. George" (1762). One of the exhibits at Kandy National Museum is the copper-plate grant of land and other royal favours which were the reward of the Sinhalese officer who had been detailed to conduct the ambassador to the capital.

Since the early years of the sixteenth century, the three European powers which ruled the Island's maritime provinces had tried, one after another, to obtain permanent possession of this capital of the inland kingdom and so reduce the entire land into submission. But their expeditions brought severe disasters on themselves. Finally, it was the Kandyans themselves who brought the foreigners into their land to expel the last (Malabar) King and thus handed over their proud realm to the keeping of His Britannic Majesty. To this day it is with justifiable pride that they claim that their land had never been conquered. The issue at Waterloo eclipsed the news of this new colonial legacy for the moment. But the value of the acquisition was not to be lost on British statesmen.

After obtaining control of the city, the British made it their first task to open it up in much the same way as they did to Scotland after stamping out the Young Pretenders' rebellion of 1745 at Culloden Moor. The results were similarly beneficial, for this new policy ensured its continued possession. Another reason that led them to do it was the establishment of plantations or estates which, originally of coffee, are now replaced by tea. The early planters, all of whom were Britishers, were the severest critics of the Government. Their criticism, actuated by selfish motives, has incidentally been to the political advantage of the permanent population.

These estates are of especial interest to India. In them live labourers whose increasing members attracted the attention of the Indian Government which sent out a Civil Servant as its Agent and, more recently, a high-ranking politician to watch the wider interests that must necessarily arise. Kandy is the centre of planting life, whether employer or employee.

Kandy is the national capital, too, in a sense. It symbolizes, far more than cosmopolitan Colombo does, the nationhood of Lanka's principal race. In the surrounding villages live the descendants of those men who fought for their unconquered earth and they tenaciously clung to their ways of Government and of life, hardly touched by Western influences until comparatively recent times. Theirs is a tradition that is linked to the Sinhalese race far more strongly than that of the low-landers who had been dominated by Europenas three centuries earlier. Their mountains sentinelled them into a commendable conservatism.

To Kandy patriotic sentiment pays homage to this day. Of all the numerous ancient capitals of Sinhalese kings, this, the last, yields pride of place in popular imagination to only two. These are the first two capitals. Kandy, chronologically the latest of a long series, comes third. By its famed Temple of the Buddha's Tooth and the historic Esala Festival (July - August), a vast pageant whose origin is lost in the mists of antiquity, it is strongly woven into the religious life of the Buddhists. It has also long been recognized as the cultural capital of the Island and in its principal suburb will be laid out the magnificent University buildings, which a famous architect has planned, when the last shot has been fired in this grim struggle and tanks have to give place to tractors.

Set in a smiling valley with a sapphire lake mirroring the intriguing hues of the mighty hills that ring round it, Kandy, with its storied past and quaint old-world architecture, is very dear to the wistful Sinhalese to whom it will always be, as it was in the days of their own kings, the Great City.

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